In a commercial establishment such as a retail store, a queue (line) of customers waiting for checkout may be formed at the checkout counter when the number of customers who want to pay for their purchases increases to a certain point, and this necessitates the customers to wait in the queue for their turn. If a staying state of customers around the checkout counter; namely, how long the customers are staying around the checkout counter, can be grasped, it is possible to develop measures for improving the operation of the store based on the grasped staying state of the customers, to thereby improve the customer satisfaction and streamline the operation of the commercial establishment.
With regard to grasping of the staying state of persons, a technology is conventionally known which generates a heat map that visualizes a state of distribution of an amount of activity of persons in a target area (see JP2009-134688A). By use of such a heat map, a user can grasp at a glance a state of distribution of a stay frequency of persons (number of staying persons detected per unit time), namely, how many persons are staying in which region of the target area, and this can improve the convenience of the user.
To generate a heat map visually showing a state of distribution of the stay frequency of persons in the target area, it is necessary to obtain the stay frequency in each segment of the target area and generate distribution information representing the state of distribution of the stay frequency, and to obtain the stay frequency in each segment of the target area, it is considered to count the traffic lines of persons in each segment, where a traffic line of a person is formed by arranging the detection positions of the person in chronological order.
On the other hand, in a state where a queue of multiple persons is formed as described above, some of the persons may overlap each other along the line of sight of the camera so that a “background” person may be blocked from view. This phenomenon is known as occlusion. If occlusions occur, the accuracy of person detection decreases and the traffic lines of persons may include a missing part. If a traffic line includes a missing part, the traffic line, which should be treated as a single line, is divided at the missing part into two traffic lines, and this may cause multiple counting or missed counting of the traffic line, thereby making it impossible to obtain accurate stay frequency and resulting in a heat map with a reduced accuracy.
However, the aforementioned conventional technology does not proposed any measure for addressing such a problem, and thus, a technology is desired which, even in a situation where traffic lines may include a missing part, can generate a highly accurate heat map by making appropriate corrections to avoid multiple counting and missed counting of the traffic lines.
The present invention is made to solve the aforementioned problems in the prior art, and a primary object of the present invention is to provide a staying state analysis device, a staying state analysis system and a staying state analysis method which, even in a situation where traffic lines may include a missing part, can generate a highly accurate heat map by making appropriate corrections.